John Laurens

John Laurens was a South Carolina officer who served as an aide-de-camp to George Washington and fought in several major campaigns of the American Revolutionary War. John Laurens served as Aide-de-camp to George Washington.

He repeatedly argued that enslaved men should be enlisted and emancipated, proposals that challenged slaveholding interests but did not produce the large Black regiment he envisioned. Laurens combined military service with one of the Revolutionary generation’s most prominent proposals to arm and emancipate enslaved men.

In Laurie Halse Anderson’s Forge, John Laurens’s antislavery arguments and the presence of Lafayette illuminate competing meanings of the Patriot cause, yet Curzon can still be seized and treated as property.